Saturday, April 15, 2017

Matter-Form and Genius-Taste

Kant privileges Form over Matter seemingly because the former is actively generated while the latter is passively received, e. g. the sensory manifold.  However, that priority still holds in one case where both are actively produced. For, as he acknowledges, Genius creates novelty in the sensory manifold, and, yet, he still subordinates it to Taste, which he defines in terms of the Forms of Cognition.  Now, though he asserts that the source of Genius is "Nature", he does not explore the relation between that attribution and that according to which Nature is a transcendent force that seeks the Perpetual Peace of the human species.  Doing so might have led him to a better balanced Form-Matter concept, i. e. to a more robust Holism.

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